Graphtec Plus CE6000-60 Professional Vinyl Cutter Review

The Graphtec CE6000 is easily among one of the best vinyl cutters made by Graphtec. This is not your regular cutter for general hobbyists by any means. The CE6000 means business and is best suited for serious hobbyists or businesses that are into making decals, stickers and signage. Those who often deal with heat transfers, multi-color and performance heat transfer vinyl cutting will also love this unit.

The CE6000 is versatile. It can work long hours and support certain kinds of mass production. And it has its limitations too. The CE6000 comes in three versions of varying cutting width. One has a width of 15 inches, another one has a width of 24 inches and another of 48 inches. This review will cover all the essentials concerning the CE6000 from Graphtec.

Features

Great for commercial businesses and individuals specializing in the field of labels, decals, sign making, decoration or other similar activities

Versatile cutter suited for a wide range of materials.

The Graphtec CE6000-60 features a digital servo motor,

Has Excellent Contour cutting capability

Comes with Graphtec Studio software.

Can store up to 8 preset conditions

Available in 3 versions: One version has a cutting width of 15 inches, another has a width of 24 inches and the other one has a cutting width of 48 inches.

Body

The CE6000 on the outside looks like a greatly built cutter. You shouldn’t expect to place this one on your desktop. As a commercial cutter, the CE6000 should be given its own dedicated space at some corner in your workplace or home. However, the 15 inch cutting width version will easily fit on a desktop. As for the others, they will need their own dedicated space.

The LCD screen is one of the highlights of the cutter’s exterior design. The user is bound to love the liberties the LCD screen will provide when navigating options. The overall setup is user friendly. We liked how very good quality materials and metal was used into making the CE6000 which makes it a strong and sturdy unit overall.

The only thing perhaps that we hated about the unit’s body was the fact that it doesn’t come with a catch basket. Having to clean the waste vinyl time to time isn’t something we are fond of and we are sure, neither are you. The catch baskets have to be bought separately.

Cutting Size

As mentioned earlier, the CE6000 has 3 versions each having a differing cutting width. One version has a cutting width of 15 inches, one has a width of 24 inches and the biggest one has a width of 48 inches.

The cutting length is the same for all at 164 feet approximately.

The quality of cuts is constant across all three versions and is pretty great in itself too. We will talk about that in details in the upcoming section.

Versatility

The massive cutting force of the CE6000 units make them very versatile when it comes to the materials they can work with. The versions with cutting widths of 15 and 24 inches have a cutting force of 300g while the force is 450g for the version which has a cutting width of 48 inches.

As for materials, expect the CE6000 to work fluently with materials like vinyl including the thick ones, packaging, card stock, heat transfer vinyls, labels, sandblast templates, rhinestone pattern media, light reflective film as well as labels and many other kinds of materials. In fact, with the kind of force available, the CE6000 can cut the very thick forms of those materials with ease.

Quality of Cutting

This is perhaps the most crucial aspect for any vinyl cutter and the CE6000 impresses greatly on this regard. This commercial cutter from Graphtec is a performance powerhouse. Thanks to high cutting force complimented by necessary items like blades and others, the CE6000 is able to put out high quality cuts even in long cuts too whose length goes as far as 1000 inches or beyond. The cutting speed is good enough for business that run on time constraints and has to deal with large orders.

The cuts delivered by the CE6000 are accurate and maintain precision which we feel are due to the features it is equipped with. It is powered by a servo motor which helps immensely with maintaining position of the blade properly and cut with precision.

Take Graphtec’s Advanced Registration Marks Sensor (ARMS) 5.0 feature for instance. Thanks to this feature, the CE6000 uses registration marks across the media using optical eye. And the best part is that the ARMS 5.0 feature in this one is able to put registration marks across most types of media properly. This way it sizes things up and delivers cuts just the way the user would want them as positioning and aligning the design only gets easier by using specific registration marks.

The cutting performance powered by ARMS 5.0 is great in simple designs as well as the complex ones. For those of you who are planning to work with full color heat transfers and stickers, the CE6000 is a champion when it comes to contour cutting printed graphics. It is also great with perforation cutting. The CE6000 has two blade positions with one for contour cutting and another for normal cutting.

The second feature you really ought to know about the CE6000 is the tangential emulation feature. Thanks to this feature, the blades of a CE6000 can rise and adjust position when cutting across corners. This eliminates the risk of tearing while cutting and makes weeding a lot easier. Put together this feature along with the overcut ability and the CE6000 can cut almost any design with highest levels of accuracy regardless of how complex the design itself is.

Apart from the fantastic cutting ability of the CE6000, we loved some of the complementary features as well. We loved how you can save 8 preset cutting conditions which business owners will find handy. Add to that the fabulous automatic paneling feature. The machine is intelligent enough to easily breakdown a big job into smaller tasks to get everything done perfectly. It makes repeating tasks easy which business owners dealing with large orders will love.

The Media Braking system is great too. It helps load media being worked on to be loaded properly and also ensures that things don’t go out of hand during operations with the media becoming unstable and out of control.

Overall, we are highly impressed with the CE6000. It isn’t diverse in terms of the kind of materials it can work with but does a great job with the stuff it can work with though. Some other commercial cutters that we reviewed can work with more materials, but the CE6000 cuts with great élan on the materials it is compatible with. Had it been capable of some more heavy duty projects we would have deemed the cutter as perfect. However, it is pretty great too.

Software & Connectivity

The Graphtec CE6000 comes with a collection of software made by the manufacturers. At the forefront of things is the Graphtec Studio which is basically made by the manufacturers. We thought that it was pretty good for a software made by a manufacturer. It allows the user to create new vector designs. One can easily import files in EPS format as well from sources such as Illustator.

The software itself has a slew of editing features such as crop and join, several auto-shapes to choose from and shading function as well. It allows tweaking line styles as well. For better printing and cutting, you can even put registration marks yourself on the designs.

The Plotter Controller is a massive convenience as well. You can easily control the essential settings and cutting conditions of your plotter straight from your Mac or PC using this feature. Using the plugin named Cutting Master 3, you can easily send designs from other software like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw directly to the plotter.

The software works smoothly for both Mac and PC.

The CE6000 demands to be connected via USB and serial ports. There is no wireless connectivity feature which can be an inconvenience if you want to work from a comfortable distance at work.

So that was pretty much all about the CE6000 from Graphtec. It can do repetitive tasks flawlessly and is built to work long shifts without stammering. Add to that the impressive cutting ability as well with the rich features. Business will love owning this unit. Serious hobbyists would love owning this unit too.